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Penn, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest train station, serves 430,000 travelers every weekday—more than LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined That wou
by CaptainZapp 9y ago
Penn, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest train station, serves 430,000 travelers
every weekday—more than LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined
That would surprise me.
According to Wikipedia Zurich main station served on average 441,400 per working day. And that's in a city of roughly 400'00 people (or 1.2M if you count the metropolitan area).
That's peanuts compared to monsters like Shinjuku in Tokyo, which was used on average by 3.64 million people per day in 2007.
So I'm wondering where they come up with the "western hemisphere busiest train station"
- arethuza 9y agoZurich, Tokyo and pretty much every other large train station aren't in the "Western Hemisphere": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere
- CaptainZapp 9y agoI stand corrected. Thanks
- alaxsxaq 9y agoSomeone was really reaching to find meaningless superlatives. Wouldn't it be better to compare this station to stations handling similar passenger numbers? I frequently use Penn Station, Union Station (DC), and 30th Street Station (Philadelphia). All of them are overloaded, but things like waiting areas, bathrooms, food, ticketing aren't really that much worse in Penn Station. Aesthetics, on the other hand...
- icegreentea2 9y agoI think it's fine. While the article spends some time talking about how shitty looking Penn Station is, I felt like it delivered its emphasis on how the actual transit part of it is slow motion dying. Like tunnels literally creeping towards collapse. The comparison to airports I think is fine for envisioning scale in an American context. Like all of the station level stuff is important, but I felt like the article was more of a plea to make sure that we'd at least fix the actual track and tunnel level problems before NYC gets strangled.
- ghaff 9y agoYeah, and there have been and continue to be ongoing improvements in the layout and general rundownedness of the concourses. I was pleasantly surprised the last time I was there. Would I like to snap my fingers and conjure up old Penn Station to replace the soulless crap built on Penn Station's air rights? Sure, who wouldn't. But the crumbling infrastructure (to say nothing of the crowded platforms underground, etc.) is the bigger problem.
- brewdad 9y agoEasy mistake to make. Sometime after the end of the cold war, US schools started properly using the Prime Meridian to define the edge of the Western Hemisphere. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, the Western Hemisphere and "the West, including Western Europe" were basically considered one and the same. I was a little confused by my kid's geography homework until I realized this change.
- sillyquiet 9y agoPresumably because Zurich is not in the Western Hemisphere.
- geogra4 9y agoOn the other hand, I can't imagine Penn Station is busier than, say, Madrid Atocha. They should have used 'New World', not Western Hemisphere.
- isostatic 9y ago450k per weekday, 552 and that's 115m per year plus weekends. That's busier than Madrid and London Waterloo.